Friday, March 24, 2017

Alex Bledsoe

Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He has been a reporter, editor, photographer and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He now lives in a Wisconsin town famous for trolls.

Like most (all?) writers, I have a couple of things going simultaneously. One is, What It Used to be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver, by Maryann Burk Carver. Raymond Carver had a life very similar to mine, and his determination to continue writing despite near-Wagnerian setbacks (poverty, alcoholism, having two children by the time he was twenty) is something with which I strongly identify. I’ve read scholarly biographies and reminiscences by other writers, but this is the closest to an autobiography as we’re likely to get (except, of course, for his short stories).

In fiction, I just started Powers of Darkness, a strange alternate version of Stoker’s Dracula. It began as an Icelandic translation authorized by Bram Stoker himself back in 1901; then, over a century later, someone finally noticed that it was considerably different from the Dracula we all know: faster-paced, with extra characters and a vastly different second act.

I’m also almost done with Lara Elena Donnelly’s novel Amberlough, a riff on Cabaret set in a magic-free fantasy world. She creates atmosphere like nobody’s business, and once you orient yourself to it, the politics and sexual mores make perfect sense (and echo in our current world).